British Lit.

I have learned quite a bit in this class. I must admit that there was a lot of reading and extra assignments such as the blogs. I am always grateful for a challenge though (especially in the long run where i will need a lot of practice with computers and MLA formatting.) Shockingly enough, one thing that I will remember for years to come is just how filthy those brits are (or were). Maybe it was just the lack of television but if these stories are an accurate depiction of what went through the average british person's mind in the 15th/16th century, all i can say is wow! they make me feel like a prude!

Paradise Lost

This was a fascinating read and I enjoyed looking back at the footnotes while reading and finding the biblical references. Out of all the classical literature, the Bible is one that I am comfortably familiar with and big epic poems like this one and Homer's works tend to reference a lot of things so it was nice to know some of the names Milton was referring to like the Philistine fish-god Dagon or Mammon which was the ?Greek? Hebrew? word for money. I particularly liked Milton's description of the demons as giants like the titans in Greek literature. It completely challenged my thinking about the physicality of these hellish creature - I guess I originally thought of demons as more bony, hunchback things haha!

The Taming of the Shrew

Ok, I may be remembering this wrong but I think this is the one that ended with the play and never went back to what was going on before the play was acted out. That was really weird- I kind of wanted to know what they ended up doing with the drunk/bum. With that said, I really like a lot of Shakespeare's stuff especially if there are supernatural elements such as the witches in Macbeth and the creatures in A Midsummer Night's Dream. However, Shakespeare can be a little hard to follow at times. I often find myself drawing little diagrams with the names of all the characters in bubbles and lines connecting each character - the relationship between the characters written out on the lines. It really helps - especially with stories like The Taming of the Shrew where there are a ga-gillion names. My memory is not what it was before the sixties... hardy har har!

everyman

From reading the other blogs, it has helped me understand the relevance of what i am reading in everyman. Thank you to sheyla for pointing out the importance of the knowledge character in this play. At first, I was thinking < what does knowledge have to do with salvation from the final judgement, wouldn't everybody who didn't go to college suffer a worst fate?> but then i realized it's more of a knowledge of why you need salvation and what is required to live into that salvation! This was a great read and reminded me of Pilgrim's Progress in that it followed a person's path to God in a dialogue/play-like form!

Romanticized "love"

Since we have been talking a lot lately about chivalry and the knight's relations with women, I thought I would put in my two cents about love and why I feel so many marriages are falling apart these days. From the earliest literature on, we see that the word "infatuation" is often replaced with "love". This is probably because most of these stories are written by men and lust is probably the biggest cloud over our reason that exists. If I wrote a sonnet about every attractive female I saw, I would never get anything else done! The problem is that this infatuation eventually runs dry and many people think this is their cue that they no longer "love" their woman and they need to go have an affair - I seriously think this is why the divorce rate is so high. True love and sacrifice comes into play when infatuation goes away. Love is standing by your woman simply because you are honoring the covenant of marriage you made to her and God. Our culture needs to get a grip!

my response to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

While the story seemed slow to take off for me, I really enjoyed it after the part where the Green Knight enters, makes his challenge, and gets his head chopped off. I don't know what I was expecting, but I really didn't think the knight would actually be green all over. Maybe I thought it would be a symbolic green like the color of a certain region of knights (like we have colors to represent our football teams) but it turned out to be much more fairy-tale like than I expected.

Also, I wasn't surprised at all that the woman turned out to be the wife of the green knight. I knew she had something to do with him because it was too strange how they asked him to stay over and over at the castle. Another thing I took to be a clue was the kisses - it was too ritualistic to just be the woman getting her jollies - and that the host wanted to exchange whatever they had received for the day - too weird a request to not mean something.

Something that I was disappointed with was the ending. It seemed to fizzle out for me. Maybe I am just too accustomed to twist and surprise endings from reading too much science fiction/fantasy and horror...

A short response to Mrs. Watson's blog about friendship in Potter series

While I agree that the friendships (and how the characters connect in general) really make the story (I was shocked to read about Harry and Ron's huge fight in the middle of part 7), I found that I enjoyed putting together pieces of the puzzle from earlier books with new tidbits of information from the later books the most! I love reading something (like a dialogue) and having no idea what it means until later on - keeps things interesting!!

Also, did anyone else not find Luna Lovegood (from Harry Potter) the most likable character in any of the books?! Well, you probably didn't but I couldn't ever understand why nobody wanted to be her friend. She was always so funny and interesting! I'm glad Harry took her out as a friend (though I can't remember if it was to the ball in book 4 or Slughorn's party in book 6)! That line she says in book 6 (i think) about missing Dumbledore's Army because it was "like having friends" was a really sad line :( I could have given her a hug when i read that but, ya know, the whole "fictional character" thing ;) - Andrew R.